Welcome to Moldova= meet at the airport

After breakfast at the hotel, your guide will meet you at 10 am for a trip to the “underground town” of Cricova, where some of the tunnels date back to the 15th century. Visit Moldova’s second-largest wine cellar and enjoy a wine tasting. The winery visit includes the underground streets the wine maturation section the sparkling wine production section the National Collection and “Tasting Rooms” the underground cinema The winery tour is followed by a wine tasting that includes 4 types of wines and aperitives like nuts and biscuits.

The Orheiul Vechi Cultural-Natural Reserve (known as “Old Orhei”) developed as a result of a harmonious collaboration between man and nature from prehistoric times to the present day, with archaeological findings as early as the Late Palaeolithic era (ca, 30-20,000 BC). Due to its strategic position close to the Dniester River, a major trading route connecting the Carpathians and the Black Sea Basin, and its geology forming a natural fortification, it has been inhabited almost continuously for thousands of years across the different civilisations and cultures who have called this place home. This has made the cultural heritage and landscape of Old Orhei a marker of national and universal culture.

Old Orhei includes the historical and cultural heritage assets (archaeological sites, rock complexes, vernacular architecture complexes, ethnographic objectives), traditional settlements (Trebujeni, Butuceni, Morovaia villages), natural heritage assets (geological and landscape ensembles, flora and fauna), land and water areas where the regulated exploitation of natural resources, agricultural, industrial and tourist activities are carried out.

Orheiul Vechi is a very unique place with its cave churches and monasteries carved into the natural limestone ridge and cliffs above the Raut River. The Old Orhei cave monasteries provided a safe place for monks to worship and live for hundreds of years.

The Monastery of the Birth of Virgin Mary This Monastery of the Birth of Virgin Mary is located in Butuceni village and dates back to the 15th- and 16th centuries when there was a little church made from wood at the site of the current building. The work of the monastery is closely linked to that of the Peștera (the Cave) hermitage. Over the course of the next three centuries, there is no evidence of the activity of the hermitages in the area. By the end of the 19th century. the monastic life in the region began to be revived. In 1905 the Monastery of the Birth of Virgin Mary was sanctified and reopened. However, after the establishment of the Soviet regime, the Monastery of the Birth of Virgin Mary, including the hermitage of the cave, was converted into an open-air museum.